How To Use Ubuntu Disk Usage Analyzer (Baobab)

This is a simple guide to check your Ubuntu disk usage using built-in program named Disk Usage Analyzer. With this, you can view ranking of folders measured by each size. This may help you finding and removing unused folders to free you some disk space. Let's try it!

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Run the Program

Open the start menu and find Disk Usage Analyzer and run it. Alternatively, type baobab followed by Enter in Terminal.

Install the Program

If you don't have Analyzer, for instance if you use Kubuntu instead of Ubuntu, you should install it in order to use it. It is available in Software Center with the name Disk Usage Analyzer or alternatively run command below in Terminal to install it.

$ sudo apt-get install baobab

Analyze Whole System

Select slash ( / ) at the beginning of Analyzer. This will include all folders present in your computer including your user directory and active disk drives if any.

Analyze Home Directory

Select Home option at the beginning of Analyzer. This will limit the rankings only to /home/username only where username is your user directory and not include the others.

Analyze External Disk

Select Scan Folder option (under hamburger menu) and select a disk drive available on left sidebar if any or go to /media/username/drivename directory where username is your username and drivename is the disk drive or partition name.

Result

The result of Analyzer scanning is a ranking of folders by disk usage size in megabytes. As an example, here is a Home directory with total size of 4.0 gigabytes where Pictures ranked number 1 with 900 megabytes size and Downloads ranked number 2 with 800 megabytes size. This means, in my whole computer, my Home directory size alone is 4.0 GB with Pictures and Downloads as its largest folders. Analyzer also displays colorful chart according to the ranking in either Pie or Bar chart form where you can fly around your pointer to see each color's size which represents each folder.

Related Tools

Analyzer is related to other Ubuntu Apps which deal with disk drives and filesystems such as Files (the file manager), Disks (the disk drive management), and Backups (the backup tool). For example, once the result displayed, clicking Open Folder to a selected item will bring you to open Files in that folder. On other systems, Analyzer is similar in purpose to Disk Usage (Android) and Xinorbis (Windows).

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